I watched the 1945 Ealing period drama Pink String and Sealing Wax the other day. In it, the always-wonderful Googie Withers entangles a young Gordon Jackson in her wiles, only to be defeated by his father Mervyn Johns.
It’s a striking film in that the major characters are all unsympathetic, and an unusual one for Ealing in that the Jackson and his siblings’ dreams of escape to a better life come to something. Usually at Ealing such escapes were strictly temporary, whether they were Alec Guinness’s technological breakthrough in The Man in the White Suit or the people of Pimlico’s Burgundian summer.
A more minor point struck me too. One of Jackson’s young sisters was played by Sally Ann Howe. She appeared in Ealing films throughout the Forties and grew up to be a star of Broadway and, of course, Truly Scrumptious in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Yet when required to cry in Pink String and Sealing Wax her acting is wholly unconvincing.
And it’s not just her. Jon Whiteley made some really interesting films as a child in the 1950s, yet in an episode of The Adventures of Robin Hood, where he plays a boy whose pet goose had been stolen by the Sherriff of Nottingham, he can’t cry for toffees either.
By contrast, I have recently come across two examples of modern British filmmakers being astounded about what child actors can achieve.
Here’s Garth Jennings talking about the two young leads in his delightful 2007 film Son of Rambow:
“They were self-confident, but still kids. They hadn’t been to any acting schools, they were still themselves. They were quite happy to play and if you wanted them to cry, they weren’t worried about not looking tough in front of anyone.
“On the second day of shooting, we were shooting the end of the movie in the cinema. I thought, ‘This is going to be too much for little Will Poulter sitting there.’ I’m talking to him off-camera about what he’s looking at and there’s all these people sitting there in complete silence. He started to well up, tears start rolling down his face, and I was just thinking ‘Holy Jesus Christ, this kid is amazing! He has no idea, absolutely no idea how much he has just made my day!’”
And here’s Nick Holt, the director of Responsible Child, a BBC drama from 2019 that has just resurfaced on Netflix, talking about its 12-year-old star Billy Barratt in the Evening Standard:
“I was amazed with how much he let go, especially in the scenes we shot in the secure unit. These were some of our most traumatic set ups – but he realised them. He understood the darkness in the story but wasn’t intimidated or overwhelmed by it.”
Holt also said in an interview Drama Quarterly:
“With this story, not only do you have a young boy in every single scene, you have him in a story that’s incredibly raw and intense and involves a brutal murder. He needs to look quite adult and it’s difficult to find all that in the same place.
“With Billy, as soon as we saw him he had those aspects. He’s incredibly mature for his age. There is a heart-wrenching scene I find difficult to watch even now. He was superb in that.”
Both Responsible Child (Best TV Movie/Mini-Series) and Billy Barratt (Best Actor) won International Emmys.
Involving children in such dramas, of course, raises ethical questions, but I know from my old day job how seriously production companies now take the safeguarding of young performers. And the networks wouldn’t risk touching them if the companies did anything else.
So why are child actors so good these days? The obvious answer is the growth of drama teaching in both specialist and conventional schools. Will Poulter didn’t go to a stage school, but in interviews he often pays tribute to the drama classes at his school, while Billy Barratt attended the Sylvia Young Theatre School.
Will Poulter has gone on to a successful adult acting career, and Billy Barratt appears to have every chance of doing so, which suggests both are exceptionally talented, but then so was Sally Ann Howes. This suggests that child actors need teaching as well as natural talent.
Mention of Sylvia Young gives me an excuse to end with an anecdote from a Guardian profile of her published in 2022 (she died earlier this year):
Every year Young takes an assembly – the school has 220 full-time students, between the ages of 10 and 16, and 900 Saturday school attenders – and asks the children “what mustn’t we be?” she says, “and they all shout out ‘stage school brats!’”
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